A helter-skelter is a tall tower with a spiral slide around it. Ride the helter-skelter.
You climb inside and come down outside on a mat, which is the whole of the ride. The word also means in disorderly haste, and the fairground helter-skelter is named from that.
1nounhelter-skelterA tall tower with a spiral slide around it.
“The helter-skelter was the only ride he would go on twice.”
helter-skelter is a ride.
A rhyming reduplication like hurry-scurry, perhaps on Middle English skelten, to hasten.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)kel- — make noise, yell
Old High German
skeltan — scold
Middle English
skelten
English, today
helter-skelter
In form a reduplication (similar to hurry-scurry and harum-scarum, both with initial /h-/ and /sk-/); perhaps based on Middle English skelten ("to hasten; to raise an alarm"), or maybe related to Old High German skeltan (“scold”) from Proto-Indo-European (s)kel- (“make noise, yell”), employed as a fossil word.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Circus & Fairground